To begin with, you have to set up user accounts that let remote sites log into
your system and establish a UUCP connection. Generally, you will provide
a separate login name to each system that polls you. When setting up an
account for system pablo, you might
give it the username Upablo. There is
no enforced policy on login names; they can be just about anything, but it
will be convenient for you if the login name is easily related to the remote
host name.

For systems that dial in through the serial port, you usually have to add
these accounts to the system password file /etc/passwd.
It is good practice to put all UUCP logins in a special group, such as
uuguest. The account's home directory
should be set to the public spool directory
/var/spool/uucppublic ; its login shell must be
uucico.

To serve UUCP systems that connect to your site over TCP, you have to
set up inetd to handle incoming connections on the
uucp port by adding the
following line to
/etc/inetd.conf :[1]

uucp stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/lib/uucp/uucico -l

The –l option makes uucico perform
its own login authorization. It prompts for a login name and a password
just like the standard login program, but relies on its
private password database instead of /etc/passwd. This
private password file is named /etc/uucp/passwd and
contains pairs of login names and passwords:

Upablo IslaNegra
Ulorca co'rdoba

This file must be owned by
uucp and have permissions of 600.

Does this database sound like such a good idea that you would like to use
it on normal serial logins, too? Well, in some cases you can. What you
need is a getty program that you can tell to invoke
uucico instead of /bin/login for
your UUCP users.[2] The invocation of
uucico would look like this:

/usr/lib/uucp/uucico -l -u user

The –u option tells it to use the specified user
name rather than prompting for it.[3]

To protect your UUCP users from callers who might give a false system name and
snarf all their mail, you should add
called-login commands to each system
entry in the sys file. This is described in the next
section.

A major problem with UUCP is that the calling system can lie about its name;
it announces its name to the called system after logging in, but the server
doesn't have any way to check it. Thus, an attacker could log into his or her
own UUCP account, pretend to be someone else, and pick up that other site's
mail. This is particularly troublesome if you offer login via anonymous UUCP,
where the password is made public.

You must guard against this sort of impostor. The cure
for this disease is to require each system to use a particular login name
by specifying a called-login in
sys. A sample system entry may look like this:

system pablo
... usual options ...
called-login Upablo

The upshot is that whenever a system logs in and pretends it is
pablo,
uucico checks whether it has logged in as
Upablo. If it hasn't, the
calling system is turned down, and the connection is dropped. You
should make it a habit to add the called-login command to every system entry
you add to your sys file. It is important that
you do this for all systems in your
sys file, regardless of whether they will ever call
your site or not. For those sites that never call you, you should
probably set called-login to
some totally bogus user name, such as neverlogsin.

Another way to fend off and detect impostors is to use call sequence
checks. These help you protect against intruders who somehow manage to find out the password with which you log into your UUCP system.

When using call sequence checks, both machines keep track of the number of
connections established so far. The counter is incremented with each
connection. After logging in, the caller sends its call sequence number, and
the receiver checks it against its own number. If they don't match, the
connection attempt is rejected. If the initial number is chosen at
random, attackers will have a hard time guessing the correct call sequence
number.

But call sequence checks do more for you. Even if some very clever
person should detect your call sequence number as well as your password, you
will find out. When the attacker calls your UUCP feed and steals your
mail, this will increase the feeds call sequence number by one. The next time
you call your feed and try to log in, the remote
uucico will refuse you, because the numbers don't match
anymore!

If you have enabled call sequence checks, you should check your log files
regularly for error messages that hint at possible attacks. If your system
rejects the call sequence number the calling system offers,
uucico will put a message into the log file saying
something like, “Out of sequence call rejected.” If your system
is rejected by its feed because the sequence numbers are out of sync, it
will put a message in the log file saying, “Handshake failed
(RBADSEQ).”

To enable call sequence checks, add the following command to the
system entry:

# enable call sequence checks
sequence true

In addition, you have to create the file containing the sequence
number itself. Taylor UUCP keeps the sequence number in a file called
.Sequence in the remote site's spool
directory. It must be owned by uucp and must be mode 600 (i.e., readable
and writeable only by uucp). It
is best to initialize this file with an arbitrary, previously
agreed-upon start value. A simple way to create this file is:

If you want to provide anonymous UUCP access to your system, you first have to
set up a special account for it as previously described. A common practice
is to give the anonymous account a login name and a password of
uucp.

In addition, you have to set a few of the security options for unknown systems.
For instance, you may want to prohibit them from executing any commands on
your system. However, you cannot set these parameters in a
sys file entry because the
system command requires the system's
name, which you don't have. Taylor UUCP solves this dilemma through the
unknown command.
unknown can be used in the
config file to specify any command that can usually
appear in a system entry:

This will restrict unknown systems to downloading files from below the
pub directory and uploading files to the
incoming directory below
/var/spool/uucppublic. The next line will make
uucico ignore any requests from the remote system to
turn on debugging locally. The last two lines permit unknown systems to
execute rmail ; but the command path specified makes
uucico look for the rmail command in
a private directory named anon-bin only. This restriction
allows you to provide some special rmail that, for instance,
forwards all mail to the superuser for examination. This allows anonymous
users to reach the maintainer of the system, but at the same time prevents
them from injecting any mail to other sites.

To enable anonymous UUCP, you must specify at least one
unknown statement in
config. Otherwise uucico will
reject all unknown systems.